A FEW WEEKS ago, in a drab fog-chilled apartment in a London suburb, I talked with a man who knew Malenkov. Although not much past fifty, he looked like an old man, as all exiles are old before their years. He was weatherbeaten and spiritless and downright afraid
— even in London— so afraid he would not permit me to name the middle European country of which he had been a distinguished diplomat of ambassadorial rank only six years ago.
Malenkov had had a hand in reducing him as well as his country to a state of servitude. Therefore he spoke bitterly of the new Soviet leader— bitterly but with the ingrained reserve of a lifelong diplomat.
He said, “The day will come it cannot be far off; perhaps a year, certainly not longer—when we will begin to look upon the Stalin years of the cold war as the gentle, the easy years. We will think how foolish we were to regard Stalin as an enigma or a silent monster or, as you journalists like to put it, the great question mark in the Kremlin. He wasn’t, you know. He was clever and he was ruthless but he was a man, a human being. He had small personal failings smoking, for instance, while he ate; and nepotism and he had of course extraordinary strength of personality on the world scene and an absolutely inhuman belief in his own wisdom and in his destiny. But my point is, he was a man, even a mellow man considering his life and mission, a man that other men could study and judge and even anticipate.
